Curmudgeonness on "Revenge of the Blog"
I started reading the commentary for the Revenge of the Blog Conference. Frankly, and no offense to the blog-star panel, I started to overdose very quickly. I had too much deja vu and bad flashbacks, from the days when the magical Internet was going to equalize us all.
The basics: If you're a professional talker, that is a journalist, some lawyers, some policy-makers, and a new punditry tool appears, this leads to more commentary. And some people are well-positioned to take advantage of this new ecological niche, and prosper in it. This leads to much ponderous pontification of What It All Means, which is of course - more punditry, on punditry, which is a favorite subject of punditry.
I saw this happen with mailing lists and Usenet. It came around again at the start of the World-Wide-Web. There was some of it for Internet-Relay-Chat. There was was another iteration when "virtual communities" were all the rage. And now it's come around to blogs.
Let me say again, there's nothing wrong with a profound navel-gaze of The Meaning Of It All. I just couldn't bear to read much of it, since I'd read it all so many times before in the past decade.
By Seth Finkelstein |
posted in cyberblather
, infothought
|
on November 22, 2002 09:30 PM
(Infothought permalink)
| Followups
